Aweber List Data Extraction

A few months ago Aweber (the autoresponder service I recommend to all my clients) came out with a new backup function — allowing you to download a backup of all your lists in one fell swoop.

For any of us who had been laboriously exporting our data one list at a time, this was real cause for celebration! I have one client with, I swear, over 100 lists at Aweber, and downloading the data from all of them was tedious, mind-numbing work. After the first time, I refused to do it anymore.

Anyway, I digress.

The only fly in the ointment is the way the data is exported. You get a zip file, and this zip file contains a folder for each list. That folder contains three MORE folders, “broadcasts”, “followups”, and “leads”. Inside the “leads” folder there are two files, “active_leads.csv” and “inactive_leads.csv”.

So if you want to have all the leads in a single file, you need some way of extracting data from this hierarchical file structure. Doing it manually can be very time consuming, especially if you have more than a half-dozen lists.

Remember that client I was talking about with over 100 lists? Scary!

But fear not, a simple solution I have for you!

Just click here to download my “Aweber Data Extraction” software tool — you should probably “right-click” and “Save Target As” (or “Save Link As”) to save the .exe file to your hard drive.

Now, let’s say you downloaded the export file from Aweber. When you unzip it, you’ll have a folder with a name similar to “yourlogin_2007_06_01 ”

It’s important that the .exe file be placed in this main Aweber data folder, on the same level with all of the folders which consist of your list names. Drop the “extract_aweber_leads.exe” inside that folder and click (or double click) that file to execute the program.

This program will then extract all of the data from all of your lists, and will create three new files, “active_leads.csv”, “inactive_leads.csv”, and “all_aweber_data.csv”(which contains both active and inactive leads).

If you choose the option of only extracting the email addresses, then the software will remove duplicates — so you won’t have more than one instance of the same email address, even if that lead has subscribed to several of your lists.

Enjoy!

Best,

Paul

P.S. If you download and use this utility, please let me know how it works for you!